That's triggered more than a little green-eyed jealousy from physicists and engineers who would like to have molecular machines at their own beck and call. So there's no small interest in developing molecular devices that can be easily harnessed to do the job.

Today, Jin Zhang at the University of California Los Angeles and a few pals say they've identified a machine that fits the bill.

A couple of year ago, chemists discovered that groups of 13 or 19 boron molecules form into concentric rings that can rotate independently, rather like the piston in a rotary Wankel engine. Because of this, they quickly picked up the moniker "molecular Wankel engines". The only question was how to power them.

Physics arXiv: Photo-driven Molecular Wankel Engine, B₁₃⁺

The new research — reported online in Physical Review Letters March 30, 2012 — helps nail down the exact process of kaon decay, and is also inspiring the development of a new generation of supercomputers that will allow the next step in this research.

S.T.A.R. The Scientific and Technological Advanced Research Laboratories was founded by a scientist named Robert Meersman, who wanted a nationwide chain of research laboratories unconnected to the government or any business interests. He succeeded not only on a national scale, but an international one as well: S.T.A.R. Labs currently maintains facilities in Canada, Europe, Australia, and Japan as well as in the United States, with the total number of facilities numbering between twenty and thirty at last recorded count. (Wiki)

Hermes was the herald, or messenger, of the gods to humans, sharing this role with Iris. A patron of boundaries and the travelers who cross them, he was the protector of shepherds and cowherds, thieves, orators and wit, literature and poets, athletics and sports, weights and measures, invention, and of commerce in general. (Wiki)

Some of the incredible things in this presentation that I saw:

Being a scientist, technologist, engineer or mathematician (S.T.E.M. nerd), means you're versed and skilled in The Scientific Method. In a laboratory and workplace that reflects the diversity of humanity, that is the one unifying truth that must be adhered to to get work accomplished.

I am still waiting for a political debate where the questions are moderated by a S.T.E.M. panel. A true "no-spin zone." The answers and outcome would be, in Spock's words, "fascinating."

Any knowledge that undermines a personal faith, is in the end, no faith at all...

2 The great 19th-century mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss called his field “the queen of sciences.”

3 If math is a queen, she’s the White Queen from Alice in Wonderland, who bragged that she believed “as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” (No surprise that Lewis Carroll also wrote about plane algebraic geometry.)

4 For example, the Navier-Stokes equations are used all the time to approximate turbulent fluid flows around aircraft and in the bloodstream, but the math behind them still isn’t understood.

5 And the oddest bits of math often turn out to be useful. Quaternions, which can describe the rotation of 3-D objects, were discovered in 1843. They were considered beautiful but useless until 1985, when computer scientists applied them to rendering digital animation.

Discover Magazine: 20 Things You Didn't Know About...Math